Since MSFS 2024 requires constant streaming from the MSFS or Azure servers while flying, this thread is dedicated to discussing the behaviour and issues. And to give feedback about any “messaging” that pops up in the sim while flying - especially error messages.
Screen shot rom the Oct 27, 2024 Global Preview video:
I hope Microsoft and Asobo will continue to explain how MSFS works, because educating users on the complexity of combining data sources in real time while streaming your flight to you in MSFS 2024 helps users interpret and report on issues. We know that historically there is a variety of data sources:
Bing Maps
World / City Udpates
Auto-generated AI fauna, buildings, roads, traffic, animals, etc.
Photogrammetry, etc
Weather
Live traffic
ATC
Missions…
I really hope that Microsoft gives careful consideration to the wording and specifics of messages that pop up to the user when one or more of those services has an issue.
The old wording was uninformative: “YOUR connection had an issue…” and “YOU are currently offline…” always implying the issue was at the client side, when very often it was either a code or server issue with any one of those services, and not “you” at all.
My best hope is the error message wording will be more accurate and descriptive with more detail, based on some telemetry, so that it’s easier to tell if the problem is on the client or server / content delivery network side. If an issue is indeed related to one or more services, it should specify which ones, so that users can provide better and more useful reports here.
I do not want to repeatedly stream stuff I purchase, whether it’s aircraft, airports, or scenery. Storage is dirt cheap, remote servers, data centers, and networks are becoming serious energy hogs, and streaming everything every time you need an asset is the opposite of being “green.”
There’s no excuse for being so irresponsible energy-wise, just because the xbox is storage-impoverished.
And if you’ve read or listened to anything at all about MSFS 2024 you’ll knwo that you don’t have to stream airports or aircraft. Scenery - well that’s centrally stored, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to put up with that - but if you’ve bought some scenery, that will be local and not streamed. It’s the “base” world that’s streamed which means no more 20Gb downaloads for world updates etc.
It wuld be nice if people did a little research bafore complainign about things.
You can download aircraft and add-on scenery. As for the rest… I sure don’t have over 2 petabytes of storage, so I’m not sure what folks want to do there besides maybe pre-cache routes?
I still suspect most of the problem is with the routing between the CDN servers and peoples’ ISPs… That is, it’s “the connection between your internet and their server”, not “the connection between you and the internet” that’s at issue.
I’m less concerned though with the wording of the error message in this case than I am with improving the reliability of the services.
A petabyte is 1000 terabytes, not 100. Unless you and your friends have a server with a solid internet connection (well over gigabit speeds, we’re talking multi-gigabit) in a location with redundant power and say, idk, 15k for the server (at least) without storage and at least 85k in harddrives (which are going to be slow, if you want anything faster you’re looking at around 300k). At this point, what you’ve managed to create is a bad copy of Azure… at which point I’m not sure why you wouldn’t just use Azure.
This is the first title I’ve ever seen that truly justifies cloud requirements. You cannot replicate this scale of data on your own unless you have extreme amounts of disposable income.
Based on my opinion and the facts, I say that Microsoft cannot provide continuous, adequate server service for the number of users. The MSFS 2020 simulator also has an ongoing problem with the servers. It is a serious problem that users do not have an adequate internet connection, which is why hundreds of thousands of users are excluded from the game.
In view of the above, MSFS 2024 will be a big failure. I was really looking forward to the MSFS 2024 simulator, but the developer chose a bad development strategy… There is no proper server background, and only a small part of the users have an internet connection with sufficient speed.
Interesting - I’m not aware that there is any “facts” around on MSFS24 when it comes down to this?
While surely there is room for much improvement on MSFS 2020 and the Bing (!) server infrastructure used I’d not call everything a dead horse until MSFS24 was out.
Microsoft can run servers well. The Azure infrastructure is at least good enough to handle cloud services for business applications around the world for large companies. The gaming aspect here is pretty niche.
For the “development strategy” I also consider that pretty subjective. If you are not fine with the (unknown) approach you can stick to MSFS 2020, however I’m not yet sure if you really have to rely on all data to be streamed.
The content manager was cut from the tech alpha and iirc there was also some footage available which showed you can keep certain things local while other packages were marked being streamed.
Long story short: until the sim was not released to the public with all initial features being in place I won’t consider anything “fact based”. Neither “good facts” nor “bad facts”.
Ok sure, always online isn’t great (I hate it in other titles)… so what’s a better solution? The install size of MS2020 is a joke online because of how big it is (my current install is almost 500gb without any add-ons aside from world updates). There is no possible way for the end user to actually store the whole sim (2 petabytes). So what’s your suggestion?
On another note… Azure is generally pretty solid? A not insignificant amount of the internet runs on azure.
It’s unfortunate folks in rural areas (at least stateside this is the most common issue) will have trouble running the sim… but I’m not sure if 10-20gb updates to the sim would be any easier for them either… we live in a world that requires a good internet connection now, for better or for worse
You obviously failed at math. 50 people, each with 40 terabytes of storage, = 1000 terabytes, or a petabyte, as I wrote, not 100 terabytes.
And no, there’s no need for a “multigigabyte connection speed”. Most people actually have lives, and won’t be flying at the same time.
And the power supply requirement is very minimal - one guy bought a used CDN Netflix server - that serves up a lot more data - 300 watt power supply.
It gets even better when you consider 50 tb hard drives - stuff 8 of those in a box, you have 400 terabytes. So a petabyte comes in at 2.5 people. 2 petabytes (the current world data) is 5 people. 4 petabytes would be the upgraded world shared among 10 people.
Lots of private “clouds” are much bigger than that.
As for “you cannot replicate that unless you have extreme amounts of disposable income”, that’s simply not true. Even today, a box with 100 terabytes of storage can be built for $5k with off-the shelf components. That’s just a bit more than I’ve spent in the marketplace in the last year.
yep, I definitely did misread your first post, hence the math going into magic land.
Dude… the sim is well over two petabytes, so you would need each person (of your original concept for 50) with a good internet connection running a server with 50 terabytes of storage assuming no redundancy whatsoever with some sort of distributed storage fabric linking these disparate boxes together into one machine for the sim client to access. I’m curious, say one of those 50 friends has a power or internet outage. What happens then? What if multiple do?
Also, those 50 terabyte drives you keep mentioning are a) still not on the market and b) slow as hell, they’re designed as archive drives. Yes, for $5k, you can make a 100tb server if you’re scrappy (I’m in the process of building a mini server for about $20). That cost does not scale when you get to such large storage servers, particularly if you insist on using incredibly high-capacity drives. A 25tb drive costs $500, roughly. That makes your cost around $50,000 (again, assuming no redundancy whatsoever using slow drives). At this point, you’re trying to reinvent the wheel for no reason. You will struggle to reach the reliability of AWS or Azure when you have such limited options for redundancy.
Also 300 watts for spinning rust? Really? That’s some witch magic there, the lowest I saw for a Netflix cdn running freeBSD was 660 watts… and I’m pretty sure that was a rig with a lot less storage.
I’ve never heard of someone creating their own private cloud with so much capacity other than LTT, but that’s a business… perhaps my circles aren’t fabulously wealthy enough though (my whole rather high-end workstation costs quite a lot less than you’ve spent on the sim in 1 yr, so…)
Actually, 2 petabytes - enough to back up the entire flightsim world.
And microsoft could solve their bandwidth problems by enabling a bittorrent data-sharing protocol among users. There are enough users with spare capacity - a gigabit fibre connection could easily share 100 or 200 mb/s of data with other users.
Make updates and downloading world data a lot less painful.
peer-to-peer caching is a good idea, if I recall Steam already enables this which is cool.
But frankly doesn’t actually address the main issue folks will likely encounter which is their own internet being the limiting factor. I’m not in the most rural location but you go 8 miles north of me and all you get is the slowest dsl connection the world has ever seen (thanks Comcast, love the monopoly you have).
The 20tb are in stock at my local shop, $500 each. I have space in my linux box for 10 of them, so if I replace the 4tb drives with 20 tb drives, it’s 200 tb (1/5 of a petabyte) for $5k. Less than $1000 more than I spent in the marketplace in the last year. So, 10 people can do it pretty easily.
The ai craze is coming to an end, so storage costs are predicted to drop - a lot. NVME drives are already frequently on sale, hard drive prices will follow suit, and we’ll probably see big price drops within 2 years.
And no, these are NOT “archival drives” - they’re NAS drives designed for heavy 24/7/365 use for 3-5 years.
Times have changed. 5 years ago I couldn’t even imagine having 11 x 4 tb hard drives - now, if anyone needs a fractional petabyte setup, they can build it. 3 extra controller cards and extra drive holders and anyone can build a box with 40 x 20tb hard drives.
800 tb, less than $25,000. Easily within reach of data researchers, and businesses that need lots of data storage to be shared amongst a small group of users.
I agree, but for those instances when things break, better info leads to a better fix.
In early 2022 there were a lot of people on the forum reporting connection errors, and after a few months in a Dev Q&A session they mentioned there had been a coding error, where MSFS was effectively making repeated calls instead of waiting for response, overwhelming Azure and resulting in mini DOS (denial of service) conditions. But the error message was always only “your connection had an issue” which pointed both the customers and devs in the wrong direction.
Since flying in MSFS 2024 will depend on streaming more heavily, and there are many services and steps in the streaming “supply chain”, I think it’s important to build in some very basic telemetry and more informative accurate messaging. There will be times when streaming is interrupted (whether one of the services, or a CDN, or a client connection) and it will be so much better to be able to distinguish where the problem might be, instead of just a generic error blaming the customer’s internet.
It might not be in Asobo’s hands, but since it is a partnership with Azure and related services, I think it’s in everyone’s interest to have more accurate reporting when there is an issue.
